Emerging Scholars: Graduate Students In and Beyond Crisis

The Students’ Committee at American Studies Association is sponsoring the following roundtable:

Emerging Scholars: Graduate Students In and Beyond Crisis

We are looking for 5-6 panelists for a roundtable that focuses on graduate school issues for the 2018 ASA conference. This year’s theme:

“States of Emergence,” emphasizes that our sense of crisis must be thought alongside our constant commitment to challenging the calamities that beset us and to producing alternative—indeed better—worlds.

We are seeking the perspectives of graduate students for our roundtable because we believe that for us to properly interrogate the issues that we as emerging scholars face, the conversation must center our perspectives.

Our roundtable aims to assess and remedy the issues of doing graduate research in American Studies in 2018. Threat of taxed tuition remission, deportation, [re]emergence of white supremacy, reduced access to healthcare, predatory lending, financial and (future) job insecurity. These are just a handful of issues facing emerging scholars in the academy. We want to explore how critical emergences of practice, thought and imagination by grad students amid racial, gendered, sexual, economic, accessible (able/disabled) crises that have arisen within academia, as well as in online scholar and activist communities.

Possible, but not limited to, topics we are looking for are:

Being placed on the Professor watchlist/doxed and harassed online

Approaching teaching/job market

Navigating social interactions online and in person

Power dynamics of graduate students as instructors

Precarity of being vulnerable in the classroom

Institutional discrimination

Managing sickness/illness, having to take time off

Balancing familial obligations

Part-time student status

First generation scholars

Setting and keeping boundaries between work, social and personal

Please send a 100-150 word abstract on your topic, along with your name, school, discipline/research area, year, position in career and 3-5 keywords in a PDF or Word Doc to j.caroccio@rutgers.edu. Deadline is Jan, 24 2018.